


No Coruscant Landmark

by Siria



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Star Wars Fusion, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-27
Updated: 2017-08-27
Packaged: 2018-12-20 14:39:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11923017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: Traditionally, a pilgrimage was one of the final stages of a Jedi's training.





	No Coruscant Landmark

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to sheafrotherdon and trinityofone for letting me pepper them with chunks of this in IM.

For a kid born and raised in the lower reaches of Coruscant, a planet like Laggyan was almost unnerving. Grasslands stretched away, almost level, to a range of mountains so distant that they looked like nothing more than a faint, purple smear on the horizon. Nothing between where Steve stood and those mountains looked to be taller than the knee-high grasses. It all seemed very unnatural. He sighed and heaved on his pack, and gave his Y-Wing one last pat before he set off.

The R2 unit whistled disconsolately at him, reminding him that it would be much quicker to fly the rest of the way than it would be to walk.

"I know, pal," Steve said, "but I guess I'm doing this part the traditional way." This part, at least, if none of the rest of it.

Steve's lightsaber swung from his belt as he walked. The weight wasn't as comforting as it should have been, because he knew he'd use it, if he had to.

Traditionally, a pilgrimage was one of the final stages of a Jedi's training: a moment to step out of the world in order to enter more fully into the Force. Maybe Master Avram would have thought this journey counted. Maybe not. Times of war, you made either compromises or sacrifices. Steve knew which he preferred. He put one foot in front of the other, and tried to keep his eyes on the horizon.

The sun was high overhead, but it was smaller and paler than Coruscant's, and even this close to Laggyan's equator the weather was cooler than Steve was used to. But there was greenness and life around him, great flocks of birds in the sky and insects burrowing through the soil underfoot, and that was a relief after close to a week in the confines of the Y-Wing. Every so often, Steve cast his senses out on the eddies of the Force that swirled around him. Laggyan was a backwater planet, with no permanent settlements since long before the fall of the Old Republic, no great natural wonders to draw thrill seekers or resources to attract the speculative. But seen through the Force it was a marvel. Steve wasn't good at this yet, at holding the scope of a whole planet and rhythm of his own breath in his mind's eye at once, but it was wonderful enough that he wanted to keep trying.

He paused to eat when the sun started to sink down behind him, making his shadow stretch out across the grasses in front of him. A low, flat rock served as table and chair. The ration cube crumbled, dry, on his tongue, and Steve brushed bits of it from his beard while he considered whether he should check in with the Senator. There was no chance of establishing a direct comm link with the fleet when he was this far from the Core, but he could at least send her a recorded message, let her know where he was. She was sure to be worried by now, and when the Senator was worried she was furious, and when she furious she could deliver a tongue-lashing as sharp as any Jedi Master. Steve hesitated, and then stuck the comm back into one of the pockets of his robe. Better to beg forgiveness later.

Steve had memorised a map of this sector of Laggyan, but he decided to stretch out through the Force again before setting out again, make sure he hadn't strayed too far north or south. The past few months had taught him something like caution, and he couldn't navigate by landmarks here the way he could back on Coruscant. He exhaled and closed his eyes, reminding himself of his pulse, and the still-unfamiliar contours of his Force-changed body, and the grass pushing up beneath his feet, and the come-and-go of the breeze around him, and the scurrying concentration of a small mammal in search of grubs and—

—and something, something nearby, something tender and painful and hot to the touch, like an infection under the skin that was just beginning to make itself known. Steve tried to get a sense of what it was, but it flared brighter at his touch, and then he heard it: a low rumbling that had him jumping to his feet and running, pack forgotten behind him.

The explosions were enormous, rolling waves of them that shook the ground beneath Steve's feet. Birds rose up out of the grasses, shrieking and cawing in distress, the earth heaving and collapsing and Steve stumbled when the ground beneath him dropped. He jumped, willing the Force to push him further than even he could reach on his own, fingers digging into the fibrous roots of plants that suddenly grew on a cliff's edge. The noise was building, the earth groaning and the Force echoing it, amplifying it, so that Steve's head was ringing. He heaved himself up and over the top, and was faced with a landscape almost entirely altered. Through the choking haze of dust in the air, he could still make out the mountains on the horizon, but the grasslands looked like they'd been chewed on by sandborers of monstrous size. Great, narrow gashes had opened up in the earth—long lines that ran parallel to one another, that turned and intersected and that were, Steve realised, entirely unnatural. One last great blast forced him to his knees, and then everything was silent.

He'd barely had a moment to breathe and brace himself when the aftershock hit: not physical, but a screaming in the Force that set the marrow in Steve's bones to rattling. He stood, staggered, and steadied himself to walk over to one of the channels that had opened up in the ground, and looked down to see not damp clay but a section of tunnel far below him—and not one made by any sandborer. The duracrete had buckled and fractured in the explosions, but one slab still clearly read _Section 4F_ in blocky yellow Basic letters. For a planet that supposedly hadn't been inhabited for more than two hundred years, the construction looked pretty recent.

Steve unhooked his lightsaber from his belt. He didn't ignite it, but its heft was a reassuring weight in his hand as he thought. Laggyan was a backwater planet, true; his navcomputer's planetary index had listed little more than its name and coordinates. Steve had come here in search of a ghost and its answers at a temple long abandoned by the Guardians of the Whills—but the Guardians had never tended to cluster in places that were really unimportant.

This planet was clearly home to more than ghosts. Now, when Steve concentrated and breathed in, he could taste more than dust on his tongue: that sense of infection, invasion, _wrongness_. The heart of it lay out of his way—maybe two, three klicks to the west of him. The Senator hadn't sent him here to track it down; Master Ches would roll all of his eyes if he knew what Steve was thinking of. After all, Steve wasn't even a Knight yet, properly speaking. He had no experience in lancing something like this. He hesitated a moment, and then took off running, following the line of the collapsed tunnel towards the infection's source.

Here and there the tunnel widened out, making what must have been small, dark rooms. Steve glanced into them as he ran, but couldn't see any signs of life, just crumbling duracrete and broken glass. No sign they'd ever been lived in at all, although an underground structure this size must have cost millions—billions—of credits. The occasional intersecting tunnels were easy enough to leap across, even if doing so made Steve think of running across Coruscanti rooftops with Buck, their pockets full of stolen bread and angry, chittering anti-theft drones in hot pursuit.

The memory hurt, but in a much less immediate way than the sense of nausea that was building as Steve ran. Something was leeching the light from the Force ahead of him, and it reeked, as foul as a dianoga's lair. Steve gritted his teeth and ran into it, and then the new shockwaves started. They were all in the Force this time, and Steve pushed back against them as best he could—cast a shield up around him and ignited his lightsaber, as much for the comfort of its blue-white glow as anything else. There was still no sign of anyone, but it seemed like all of Laggyan was hushed, waiting; Steve couldn't even hear the breeze rustling through the grasses anymore.

There was a spot ahead—easily as wide across as Glitannai Esplanade—where all the tunnels stopped and the land slumped in a shallow concave. The heart of whatever this was, Steve was certain. The shockwaves stopped, and Steve dropped down into the tunnel; the duracrete was a shock against his feet after so many miles spent walking across grasslands. It was cooler here too, and darker, and Steve felt his way forward in the glow of his lightsaber. A few strides took him into a section of tunnel that was still intact, and a few more into a large, circular space beneath a sagging roof. In the dim light, Steve couldn't see the far walls, but he didn't need to—everything important was right in the centre of the room.

There was a chair—a perfectly ordinary-looking grey plastisynth chair, the kind you could buy from pretty much any merchant on the HoloNet. It sat right on the edge of a crack, a fissure that ran much deeper than any tunnel and one that, Steve could feel, was just an echo of a much deeper one in the Force. Steve's bones ached from being near it, just as they had when Master Avram had administered the injections—the feeling of the Force being unwillingly diverted, even if momentarily, from its natural course.

And on the chair sat a Sith Lord, robed and masked.

Steve held his lightsaber out in front of him: the traditional gesture of challenge. "I've defeated your kind before. I can do it again."

The Sith Lord made no response. Steve couldn't tell if he was breathing—was he even alive? The Force-sense of rot was overwhelming; maybe what Steve had felt had been the Sith's death rattle. But as soon as Steve took a step forward to check, the Sith's head moved, tilting in a parody of inquiry.

"You're hurting this place," Steve said, trying to put all the mastery he still didn't feel into his voice. "Stop it."

The Sith stood and, with a flick of the wrist, ignited his own lightsaber. Its blade glowed as red as a desert sunset. "Jedi," he said, voice broken and distorted by his mask.

Steve sank into a duelling posture, or at least the best approximation of the traditional forms that he could manage. He may have taken out a practice droid more than two hundred times, but he hadn't had the time for real training. Taking down Stormtroopers wasn't the same as facing off against a true Sith, and the Senator could still get a stun blaster's bolts around his shields if she put her mind to it. He steadied his breathing. "Put the blade down," Steve said. "Stop this. The Council w—"

"No," the Sith said, and raised his free hand. This close, it was clear what the Sith was doing. There was a natural fissure in the Force here, one of the places where the barriers between _now_ and _then_ , _here_ and _there_ were just a little weaker than normal. In centuries past, it would have drawn oracles and Guardians, anyone who wanted to lose and find themselves in equal measure. Now, the Sith Lord had attached himself to it just as a parasite would seek out a pulse.

"Don't," Steve said, and stepped forward and swung.

The Sith Lord was at least as strong as Steve, and every deflection and parry of a blow rang up Steve's arms and set his shoulders to aching. Brute strength wasn't going to save him here—but then, he gradually realised as sweat trickled down his back, as his breath came more heavily, skill wasn't going to give the Sith the advantage, either. The Sith lashed out with a great overhead arc of the blade that would easily have been a killing blow, but Steve was able to kick out and connect with the Sith's suddenly unguarded right side. If Steve hadn't known better, he would have said that the Sith had spent no longer training with a lightsaber than Steve had.

In a contest like this, it might be even odds who would win, but Steve had grown up on Coruscant's streets: he was used to finding ways to tip the odds in his favour, and even more used to using heights to his advantage. He pivoted, distracting the Sith with a taunting blow that left the hem of his cloak ragged and singed, and reached down deep into Laggyan's soil. Steve could feel where it was aching and sore from such unaccustomed tremors, but he coaxed it to help him anyway. _Rise up_ , he urged it, _we can make it better_ , and told the dark soil to remember when it had been surging roots, been plants striving for the light, been long-vanished hills. It responded.

A great column of earth pushed up beneath him, propelling Steve up and forward just as if he'd been launched from a springboard. He somersaulted over the Sith's head, and got in a vicious kick to the back that had the man stumbling. By the time the Sith recovered and whirled to strike again, another column of earth had helped Steve leap again, and again, and this time he brought his hands and the hilt of his lightsaber down together and struck the Sith such a blow on the head that Steve heard the helmet crack and splinter.

The Sith Lord fell backwards, toppling the chair and dropping his lightsaber. The chair landed askew on top of the rift in the ground, too large to fall in, but the lightsaber bounced, rolled, and was gone. Steve tried to move in, press his advantage, but the Sith heaved himself upright. The crack in the helmet was wide enough that Steve could see the glare of one baleful blue eye, and hear the Sith's voice without the distortion of the mask's vocoder.

"I will complete my quest," the Sith said. "I will obey my master."

Once, during Steve's abbreviated Jedi training, Master Ches had produced two pairs of ysalamiri and set them at either end of the temple's dojo. The furry little creatures were able to generate a bubble around them that repelled the Force. They made Steve uneasy. "You need to learn to fight with the Force, but also how to do without it," Master Ches had said, his tail swishing in time with his words. "A Jedi Knight's sense of self must be rooted in the Force but grow beyond it."

Steve had nodded as if he'd understood that, and then the Master invited the Senator in to spar with Steve and Steve had ended up on his back with a heel planted firmly against his chest in less than a standard minute. Though Steve had gone most of his life unable to sense the Force, a few weeks spent open to it had made what was once normal seem disorienting, dizzying.

It was the same feeling, listening to a voice which had been a constant companion during his childhood and which he'd never thought he would hear again. " _Buck_?"

"I will complete my quest," Buck repeated, his face as much a mask as the one that had been shattered. "I will obey my master." He raised a hand and Steve could feel it through the Force: the press of it, like a violent gust of wind.

Every sinew strained as Steve fought to stay upright. Even once he managed to call up a shield against the blows, it was difficult to do that—Buck was single-minded right now and Steve wasn't. Couldn't be. All of their childhoods, Steve had been the one who'd longed to be a Jedi and serve a resurrected Republic, who'd played at heroes and adventures played out among distant stars. Buck had been the sensible one, always more concerned with where the next crust would come from and sighing as he hauled Steve out of scrape after scrape. Steve had been the one to volunteer for Master Avram's experiments. Buck had been the one who fell. Steve had—Steve had _seen_ him fall, had seen Buck grapple with the Emperor's assassin and then topple, wide-eyed and bleeding, from the skyscraper's roof.

"You need to stop this," Steve said through gritted teeth. "You're killing this planet, you're—this isn't you, Buck."

But when Steve cast his mind outwards, he couldn't seem to find the Buck that he knew. Where Buck should have been in the Force, there was an absence, and within that absence there was a corruption—and what made Steve flinch, what made bile rise in his throat was the knowledge that this wasn't anything Buck had chosen. He hadn't broken faith; he hadn't turned to the Dark Side; he'd been wiped and repurposed, as neatly as any droid.

"I have a quest," Buck insisted, "I have a _quest_." He stretched out an arm, trying to summon back his lightsaber from wherever it had fallen to, and there was something new in his eyes, something frantic and panicked like a wild animal that had just realised it was caged. All of that split his focus just enough to let Steve push his shield forward, to turn it from a defence into a hammer blow.

"You're my friend!" Steve yelled. "You know better than this, you were better than this. Buck, you _know_ me, you—"

For the space of a heartbeat, Steve felt it—a flickering light in the Force, the way a tiny ember might glow brighter if you breathed on it—and Buck ripped off the shattered remains of his mask, tossing them to one side. But then he straightened and said, "I am the Emperor's Hand."

And that was a name Steve knew; that was a name he'd only ever heard pronounced with grim finality, not in pride. "No, you're not. You know me. You've known me your whole life. You're my _friend_ , and your name is Buck—"

"No," Buck yelled, gloved hands clenched into fists at his side, "that's not possible. _No_." The ground started shaking beneath their feet again, much more violently this time—not the implosions that had brought down the tunnel roofs, but a shaking apart. The earth columns that Steve had conjured up toppled; overhead, the roof sagged further with a dangerous creak of earth and duracrete and steel stressed almost past endurance. It was all going to cave in.

In desperation, Steve gathered together a half dozen memories—two skinny little orphans growing up in the shadow of empire, left with nothing but a name and each other—and pushed them out through the Force at Buck. He hoped that they would be enough to make Buck remember—enough to fill up all the empty spaces where his best friend had once been—and for a moment Steve was sure, _sure_ , that Buck knew who he was. But then the panic in Buck's eyes grew wilder, and he took a step back.

"You know it's true," Steve pleaded, even as the crack in the floor started to become wider and the chair finally fell the whole way through. Bits of rubble and soil were raining down on their heads. "You—"

"I know I am the Emperor's Hand," Buck snapped, and he had no lightsaber but lightning crackled and coiled around his hands regardless, "I am his vessel, he gave me a _quest_ —"

And the roof came down on top of them.

When Steve blinked awake, it was dark—but not the dark of being buried alive. Laggyan's sun had just set, its twin moons were beginning to rise, and Steve was lying on a patch of trampled grasses. He sat up slowly, wincing at how his head felt like a rung bell; when he touched his temple, his hand came away tacky with dried blood. To his right sat his lightsaber, powered off. To his left, a hole in the ground showed where the underground facility had once been. Steve stood, carefully, and peered into it, and didn't think that it was just the fading light that made it look like a sinkhole: pitch dark, bottomless.

The grasslands around him were quiet and empty. The hole in the ground, the great gouges carved out where the tunnels had once been, were the only signs that anything had shaken this planet. When Steve closed his eyes and searched in the Force, he found scar tissue instead of corruption. Buck was gone.

Steve scrubbed at his stinging eyes. Buck was gone, and he was wearing the robes of a Sith, and he'd pledged allegiance to the Emperor—but he hadn't left Steve to die. He hadn't hurt Steve any further, though he could have. He'd hurt this planet, but he'd cauterised the wound instead of leaving it bleeding. Steve was alone, but Buck was out there. Buck had been dead, and now he was alive; changed, strange, but _alive_.

Well, Steve thought as he took a steadying breath. It wasn't like you couldn't say the same of him.


End file.
